Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship

Dr. James V. Green

Taught In:English

Subtitles Available In:English

About the Course

#1 Entrepreneurship Course on Coursera*

#8 Overall Business Course on Coursera*

*CourseTalk's "Top Rated" MOOCs (November, 2013)

This course assists aspiring entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies. With strong economies presenting rich opportunities for new venture creation, and challenging economic times presenting the necessity for many to make their own job, the need to develop the skills to develop and act on innovative business opportunities is ever present.

Using proven content, methods, and models for new venture opportunity assessment and analysis, students will learn how to enhance their entrepreneurial mindset and develop their functional skill sets to see and act entrepreneurially. The initial steps to creating a business plan, and raising financial capital to launch the firm, are examined as well. Our goal is to demystify the startup process, and to help you build the skills to identify and act on innovative opportunities now, and in the future.

Thursday, 28 November 2013

One of the world’s biggest education publishers has joined with one of the most dominant and iconic software companies on the planet to bring colleges a new—and free—learning-management system with the hopes of upending services that affect just about every instructor, student, and college in the country.

Today Pearson, the publishing and learning technology group, has teamed up with the software giant Google to launch OpenClass, a free LMS that combines standard course-management tools with advanced social networking and community-building, and an open architecture that allows instructors to import whatever material they want, from e-books to YouTube videos. The program will launch through Google Apps for Education, a very popular e-mail, calendar, and document-sharing service that has more than 1,000 higher-education customers, and it will be hosted by Pearson with the intent of freeing institutions from the burden of providing resources to run it. It enters a market that has been dominated by costly institution-anchored services like Blackboard, and open-source but labor-intensive systems like Moodle.

Sign up at https://www.coursera.org/course/sjtul.... The course 法与社会 Law and Society by Ji Weidong from Shanghai Jiao Tong University will be offered free of charge to everyone on the Coursera platform.

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artopened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

"On September 10, we announced our collaboration with edX on the open source platform, Open edX. Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by joining forces we can work towards our goals much faster. We want to thank the Course Builder Community for your experimentation, feedback and advocacy. Your contributions have been critical and we will take our learnings from Course Builder and apply them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platfom. For further details please see the forum announcement."

By

EdX, the online course provider created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, sees an open-source future for massive online courses. On Tuesday, the company announced it has found a like-minded partner in Google, which will work with edX to make its online course platform more accessible to aspiring developers.

Together, edX and Google’s programmers will build Open edX, an open-source MOOC platform that will be made available on MOOC.org. The website, which will launch early next year, will enable anyone -- universities, corporations and individuals alike -- to create online courses.

Speaking toInside Higher Ed, Anant Agarwal, president of edX and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the new platform and website could be described as a method to crowdsource education.

"Edraak, is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform that is an initiative of the Queen Rania Foundation (QRF). QRF is determined to ensure that the Arab world is at the forefront of educational innovation. As such, QRF will capitalize on regional Arab talent and leverage technology developed by the Harvard-MIT consortium, edX, to create an Arab MOOC platform. The new MOOC platform will present the Arab world with unique and vital opportunities that can be part of a necessary revolution in education and learning.

First, the platform will broadcast the best Arab professors to the region, offering original Arabic courses - developed by QRF - to further enrich Arab education. The platform will also give Arab learners access in Arabic to courses taught at top tier universities like Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkely. All courses are delivered at no cost to the learner."

Cambridge, MA – November 8, 2013 – Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan announced today the creation of Edraak, an education initiative of the Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development (QRF). Edraak, a partnership with non-profit online learning initiative edX, will be a MOOC portal for the Arab world and will bring quality education to millions of Arabic-speaking students around the globe. Her Majesty Queen Rania witnessed the historic signing of the agreement by QRF CEO Haifa Dia Al-Attia and edX president Anant Agarwal at edX's Cambridge offices.https://www.edx.org/press/queen-rania-foundation-partners-edx

It's amazing, for musicians and music lovers alike. A young Portuguese developed an innovative platform, able to identify the chords for any song. Chordify co-founder José Pedro Magalhães is currently a researcher at the University of Oxford in England. José Pedro dedicated to the creation of this software platform, unique in the world, that converts any song (in MP3 or YouTube, for example) in the respective chords that give it life.

PIXELearning offers this visual that discusses why games are good for learning. In the visual you will find information on the following areas: Play, Rewards, Mastery, Engagement and Flow Theory as well as Laws of Learning.

Google Play for Education app spotlight
Splashtop Whiteboard lets you present rich content to the class without feeling tied to your desk. Connect to your computer over WiFi, then broadcast audio, video, presentations and more to your students’ tablets.http://goo.gl/QY0533

Like Illustrator, Photoshop also includes some very powerful vector editing tools. In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a geometric background effect for a poster design in Photoshop using a few simple shapes, blending modes, and transparencies. Let's get started!

The meaning of "open" gets tested as edX and Coursera go east

The Middle Kingdom is the center of attention for#MOOC providers Coursera and #edX. Each announced its own plans--just days apart--to expand their platforms in China.

According to statistics provided by Coursera last year, the Chinese audience is the fourth largest consumer of its free online courses, behind the U.S., Brazil, and India. But expect China’s ranking to rise.

As #MOOCs attempt to capture a global audience, it naturally raises questions about censorship in countries, like China, where freedom of information is a contentious issue. Will economic courses on communism, socialism and capitalism require pre-approval from one of China’s two million Internet monitors? What will happen if a course features politically sensitive stories about Tiananmen Square or Tibet?

Maryland and other university systems have partnered with companies such as #Coursera, which makes college classes available online, for free. That has allowed students around the world to tap into top schools in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

But some have worried that it may also be a threat–both to faculty, who could see positions eliminated, and second- or third-tier colleges that could lose enrollment as a result.

“If at the end of the day this means there aren’t as many universities or some people don’t have jobs, you know, this is not a welfare business,” William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, said at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual meeting. “We have the interests of the nation at stake.”

Online courses

Learn how Google apps and other web tools can help you meet your teaching and learning goals. Your educator peers have created a set of self-paced online courses to help you learn when it's convenient for you. Review videos, toolkits, and reflection questions to build your skills and confidence in using the right technology to meet students' needs for today and the future.

Mechanical engineering faculty from a private Indian university will soon be pursuing their PhDs from Michigan Technological University.

The new agreement with Vidya Pratishthan, located in Baramati, India, creates a 2-plus-2 PhD program in mechanical engineering for faculty, plus a 1-plus-1 master of science program for students.

Qualifying faculty will complete the first two years of their PhD program in India, where they can take Michigan Tech courses online and graduate courses from any of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Then they will travel to the US and spend the final two years of their program conducting research with Michigan Tech faculty advisors.

The Siddheswar Temple in Baramati, India. The city is home to Vidya Pratishthan, a private university that is partnering with Michigan Tech to create a 2-plus-2 doctoral program for faculty. AbhijeetHS photo'via Blog this'

More than a half-dozen idea factories are slated to open in Chicago over the next couple of years. Some are focused on scientific research, others on product design and development. All are hoping to contribute to the next generation of homegrown tech startups.

Most of the planned centers are coming out of the area's universities, which are eager to commercialize their research and meet growing demand from students and faculty for more entrepreneurship-related resources. But private-sector groups are jumping in as well.